


Razorwhipped Into Shape

by orphan_account



Category: Dragons: Riders of Berk (Cartoon), How to Train Your Dragon (Movies)
Genre: Gen, and decided to fill in some in between episode relationship development, and im not rewriting them so you're gonna have to live with the 'but' in there for no reason, but I was thinking a lot about how weird it was that Windshear listened to Dagur in the s2 finale, first tag didn't work for some reason, most of the fic takes place between 'A Time To Skrill' and 'Maces and Dragons Part 1', the 'Dragons' writers don't own that, what I can think of dumb pun-y titles that don't necessarily reflect the content of the story too, you're not my dad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-24
Updated: 2016-01-24
Packaged: 2018-05-15 21:45:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5801386
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Shortly after the disaster trying to catch the Skrill turned out to be, Ryker decides to send Heather on a wild goose chase to Ice Crack Island to check for Snow Wraiths and keep at least one of the Berserker siblings out of his hair. Luckily for him, Dagur decides to tag along as well.</p><p>If he'd realized how one, simple trip would effect how Heather, Dagur, and Windshear saw each other from then on, maybe he wouldn't have felt so lucky.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Razorwhipped Into Shape

“This is such a wild goose chase,” Heather stood at the bow of their- Ryker’s, really- ship with her arms crossed, her foot tapping impatiently.

“Not sure I get what you’re complaining for. You’re the one who volunteered to check this place out, Sister.”

“Because I thought Windshear and I would be flying in, checking to see if the Snow Wraiths had ended up hibernating in Ice Crack Island instead, and flying back immediately when we confirmed that no, they didn’t, it’s obviously way too small,” Heather turned to narrow her eyes at him, like they had when she’d had him at the wrong end of her ax. “I’d be on my way home already if you hadn’t insisted on us coming together.”

“And miss out on this sibling bonding opportunity?” Dagur leaned against the railing and shot his sister one of his winning smiles. She didn’t seem to appreciate the gesture. “Heather, you wound me.”

No matter badass his sister had turned out to be, if the island did turn out to be populated then one dragon and its rider didn’t stand a chance against even a small flock of Snow Wraiths. Just because his sister obviously didn’t trust him to have her back yet didn’t mean he couldn’t watch it for her.

(Heather didn’t know that _he_ knew that she didn’t trust him, she didn’t seem to have caught on that he wasn’t an idiot yet. That was fine, they were still in the ‘getting-to-know-you’ stage of the ‘post-attempted-fratricide’ part of their relationship. They’d get past it eventually, Dagur had a whole chart drawn up.)

Heather rolled her eyes until they landed on the dragon casting a shadow over their ship. Dagur had to admit that the Razorwhip was a pretty impressive tool to have in their arsenal, even if the sound of wingbeats overhead still kinda gave him the heebie-jeebies.

His sister let out a long, low whistle and the beast did a few turns before dipping into a sudden drop. It dived down to land on the deck with a surprisingly subtle ‘thump’, with only the slightest shift of the ship underfoot.

No wonder she and the dragon rider girl had managed to take out his whole crew behind him without him managing to catch them at it. It probably wasn’t hard.

Heather and her dragon could probably do it again, if they ever felt like it.

Dagur gripped the railing tightly, feeling the wood groan under his fist as he watched his sister step up to the physical incarnation of fire and steel she rode around on and scratch it under its chin like a prized sheep. ‘Windshear’ purred and leaned forward, butting its head affectionately against hers. Dagur would give Hiccup’s lovey-dovey method one thing: it tricked the Dragon into thinking it wasn’t a near-unstoppable monster capable of snapping on the humans around it at any moment almost as well as it tricked the owner.

“You have got to show me how you get that thing to listen to you when we manage to hunt my Skrill back down, Sister,” Dagur didn’t bother to hide how impressed he was at her control over the beast. Sure, she must’ve learned from the other dragon riders, but Dagur had always figured that merry gang had only really managed to work due to Hiccup’s constant presence keeping the dragons in line. That Heather managed on her own while surrounded by a bunch of hunters who didn’t seem to realize how valuable a dragon-tamer could be was almost as impressive as Hiccup himself.

Almost. Hiccup was Dagur’s arch-nemesis, after all, and Heather had never gone toe-to-toe with a Red Death and come out with only five fewer toes.

He realized Heather was looking at him funny. Had she said something? Thinking about Hiccup sometimes did bad things to his focus. “Huh?”

“I said,” Heather sighed, obviously exasperated. “I don’t think my methods are really going to do what you think they are, even if that Skrill ever does come anywhere near you ever again. Which you shouldn’t assume it will.”

“Why not? Your dragon follows your commands just fine,” Dagur tilted his head so he was addressing the Razorwhip directly, smile stretching into a wide, crooked smirk. “Don’t you, girl?”

Dagur reached out to rub the dragon under its chin and let out a high cackle as he had to yank his hand away from its snapping jaws.

“Don’t touch her,” Heather snapped, stepping away from Dagur to climb into her saddle. “We’re almost to Ice Crack, I’ll fly ahead and meet you at shore, alright?”

“Uh, no, you still haven’t answered my questio-” Dagur had to shut his mouth as the dragon’s take off blew frigid wind into his face.

Dagur watched the two fly off toward the island with narrowed eyes until they were lost in the clouds, then lowered his gaze until they landed on some poor dragon hunter soldier who’d been staring at him.

The Berserker caught the exact second the poor bastard realized he’d been spotted as he started stepping back, and even as his upper lip curled into a snarl he let a few sympathetic snickers slip out from between his teeth. Not that it to comfort the soldier any as Dagur started toward him. “And who exactly are you, ‘cause unless you’re Viggo Grimborn himself I don’t see what makes you think you can just stand around doing nothing on my ship!”

-

True to her word, Heather was waiting for him at shore when their ship made land, Dagur still leaning against the bow. He was calmer now, the sound of the sailor- apparently named ‘G- G- Geir’- slapping away at the water behind them had done wonders for his mood.

His sister watched the guy swim toward them at an impressive speed as Dagur walked down the gangplank, pulling on the cloak that he’s allowing as his one concession to the freezing air. The people he threw overboard always somehow ended up being excellent swimmers, it was uncanny.

“Well, sister, here we are! You been waiting long? I tried to get these idiots to pick up the pace, but you know how it is. The crew isn’t moving fast enough, you try to motivate them, then they aren’t moving fast enough plus they’re complaining about how their nose is bleeding and they think it’s probably broken, it’s a vicious cycle,” Dagur walked up close to her. He was actually trying to figure out how to work in some sort of touching sibling hug moment. Dagur was pretty sure those happened when siblings disagreed, he just wanted one without getting to the part where either of them were. Actually sorry. 

He hated arguing with her when they had better people to direct the full force of their ire at. Everything always seemed to go so much smoother when it was them versus the Dragon Hunters.

Heather didn’t seem to get the message, but after a funny look she didn’t step back immediately either. That was probably a good sign, right?

“It’s fine, but the less time we waste here when we could be with Ryker, filling in whatever holes are in his plans to keep the dragon riders off our back during the next hunt, the better,” Heather turned and Dagur wondered if his mind was playing tricks on him again as he watched her hand twitch upward toward his arm as if to clap him on the shoulder before walking away.

There’d been a pretty strict ‘no touching me or Windshear or any of my stuff, ever’ rule from the get-go. He had only managed to work his way around it once or twice, after she’d done something she probably figured had made him doubt whether or not he could trust her. It wasn’t like Dagur was touchy-feely or anything, but he’d always felt more comfortable when he could get an actual, physical grip on a person. Even more so after being locked up.

Dagur followed after her toward the nearest cave, the Razorwhip’s tail leaving a thin, winding trail in the snow behind them. He could feel the quiet like a layer of thick slime on his skin, uncomfortable and weighing him down and obvious to anyone who could see it dripping off of him.

“So…” Dagur started and even though she stiffened before she looked at him he liked to imagine he saw the same determination behind her eyes as lived in his head. If she was trying, that meant she wanted this to work as much as he did, right? Maybe he could try and figure out what had pissed her off so much. “How’d you manage to get ahold of Windshear, anyway?”

“I didn’t ‘get ahold’ of her,” Heather clenched her jaw, and Dagur was about to resign himself to a day of him saying stuff that seemed to get her mad for no reason and then her not actually explaining what he’d done wrong until she continued. “I… found her after she’d been injured in a fight with a Typhoomerang.”

“Oh! So you killed it for her?”

“No, I helped nurse her back to health. After she was better I used some of the stuff I’d learned from the dragon riders when I was on Berk three years ago to help show her she could trust me.”

Dagur blinked… “Then you two killed the Typhoomerang together?”

“We didn’t kill anything! Trust, that’s all it was,” Heather shook her head and looked away, her hands fisted at her side. Dagur turned to look at anything but her. Their pace had slowed as they talked, and Windshear had started to move ahead of them, seemingly fascinated with its reflection in the ice cave.

“Could you at least tell me what your problem is?” Dagur bit the words out without even looking back toward her. He never seemed to do anything but mess up, when it came to getting her back. It would be easier to deal with if he knew what about himself he needed to fix. There was a brief pause in which Dagur kept walking where Heather seemed to have nothing to say.

“What MY problem is?!” Heather’s voice echoed, loud and sudden against the walls of the cave and Dagur let himself smile even as he turned around to yell right back at her. Heather hadn’t actually raised her voice to him since she’d tried to kill him. Maybe, finally, he’d found the end to whatever passive aggressive torture she was trying to put him through.

“Yeah!” He yelled, turning around to find her a couple of yards back. He was still smiling. “Your problem! I’m trying to get this weird dragon thing you have going on that keeps setting you off, but you aren’t making it easy! First you join up with the riders to kill me, that I kinda get ‘cause you’ve got a dragon and I slaughtered your village and all, then you join up with the hunters with me because you’re feeling the familial bonding all of a sudden! Okay, so you’re a little mercurial, but I can work with that! You really get into the swing of it, start really kicking ass when it comes to catching dragons, using your dragon as an awesome weapon against the Riders- you had that whole beginning archenemy thing going with the rider girl where you betrayed her and now she’s sworn to destroy you, I’m really feeling like we’ve got a lot in common here! But-!”

Heather took a step back from him as he took a breath, a few manic giggles burbling up in his throat every time he tried to breath out. It feels so good to finally be getting this all out, really healthy. He should have started shouting his grievances directly to his sister ages ago.

“But! Then! Then every time I turn around and try and, y’know, lend my advice on the situation you look at me like I just took a huge step in yak dung! You talk about rounding- rounding up dragons for their expensive pelts, all laughs, I join in and suddenly I’m somehow the bad guy? I’m trying to, y’know, put in an effort and get a handle on you and your pet dragon’s relationship and I ask a couple of questions about how you got her to recognise you as her superior and you act like I’m gonna turn around and try and take her from you or something!”

Heather looked… stricken. Like she hadn’t realised he’d noticed how weird she got whenever he talked about dragon hunting, or… like she’d actually been worried he or the hunters themselves were going to take her dragon from her. His smile dropped.

“.... wait, Sister, you know I-”

“You have no idea what you’re talking about, Dagur,” Heather closed her eyes, and as both of them grew quiet Dagur realised that he could hear Windshear breathing right behind him. She must have snuck up on him while he was ranting.

He had just opened his mouth to ask what it was doing when he was cut off by a sudden, ominous ‘crack’.

“Wha-” He had just enough time to look down and see the ice beneath him rapidly growing spider-web cracks before it shattered, stealing his breath away with a sudden drop.

He found himself falling into some sort of hole in the cavern floor that had been covered with only a thin layer of ice, and when he heard his sister scream out Windshear’s name he realised the dragon was falling with him, too shocked and closed in to spread its wings. He looked up, trying to catch sight of his sister only to realise that some other part of the cave was coming down on top of them, like the whole cave had collapsed.

He wondered if Heather had been caught up in the cave-in, crushed.

He felt something slam into him from the side, razor-like spines pressing against him but not slicing him open, before everything went black.

-

Dagur woke up, which he hadn’t been expecting. He was shockingly not freezing, although he could feel the cold from whatever ground he was laying on seeping up through his cloak. There were heavy, exhausted gasps, coming loud and low enough that they must belong to a dragon, filling whatever cavern he was in and echoing off the walls. When he opened his eyes it was still too pitch black for him to figure out what was going on.

“Wha- ugh, Windshear?” He really hoped it was his sister’s dragon he was hearing. The beast didn’t like him, but it was at least tame enough that it might not be actively hostile.

The gasping stopped for a second, and then was accompanied by flickering embers glowing behind the Razorwhip’s teeth. The glow let him see enough of the cavern to know he could sit up, and as he rose he took in the state of the dragon beside him.

It… didn’t look great. If you’d asked him this morning he’d have called the beast’s hide damn-near impenetrable, but there was no mistaking the shine of blood down its side where half of it’s scales had been scraped away. It was breathing heavily, wincing as every inhale stretched the damaged skin, and there was something off about how its left back leg was hanging.

From what he could tell Dagur was almost entirely uninjured, and memories of the fall were slowly sliding back into place.

“Why the Hel would you-” He reached out unconsciously to touch the dragon’s side and was met with a hiss and its head winding down to get between him and the injury. “See? You hate me!”

The Razorwhip clearly didn’t disagree, its eyes narrowed as he failed to pull his hand back immediately.

The cavern wasn’t huge, and he didn’t have enough light to check for air holes. Injured as it was, the dragon wasn’t going to be much help and was definitely taking up more air than he was. 

The smart thing to do would be to kill it while it was down and make up for it not putting heat out any more by slicing it open and staying inside it when he needed warmth. He liked his sister and all, but after three years locked up he didn’t want to die in an enclosed space without ever having captured Hiccup and his Night Fury for himself. At least if he killed the Razorwhip, and he couldn’t get out, and no one found him, he could say his last act in life had been taking down a dragon.

The Razorwhip was still glaring at him, lifting its wings to make itself bigger even though it clearly hurt the beast. Dagur thought of how hard his sister’s eyes had gotten when he’d brought up her dragon being taken away, and could see her reflected in the Razorwhip’s gaze.

He knew suddenly and without a shadow of a doubt what sort of company his mind would summon up for him if he found himself suddenly trapped, freezing and possibly suffocating, in this cavern without any other living thing to keep its trickery at bay.

“If I let you slowly bleed to death in this cavern, beast, I’d have to hope I froze before my sister found me,” he’d seen Heather speak to Windshear like it could understand her all the time, and without any other way of convincing the beast to let him fix it he’d have to hope she did so for a reason other than sentiment.

Windshear’s head tilted, like it was trying to figure out what to make of him.

“We’ve slept in the same room, and fought together, and you’re my sister’s dragon, and you just- saved my life, I think. Let me help you,” he still held his hand out and it took some effort not to jerk it back when the Razorwhip suddenly darted its head toward his palm. He was half prepared to lose the limb when instead it pressed its horned snout to his palm and held his gaze steadily. “What- I don’t know what this means, are we good? What’s happening?”

Windshear rolled its eyes at him and then laid its head on the ground, leaving him with a clear path to its side.

“Heh. Guess you figure you’ve got nothing to lose, huh?” Dagur slowly crawled up to its injury, the light from the Razorwhip’s mouth brightening so he could get a better look at it, and felt his mouth curl into a snarl. “Well the good news is that if we get out of this, you’re gonna have a very impressive scar. All of the male dragons are going to be duking it out to get at the dragon with this battle trophy, let me tell you.”

The dragon let out a sort of growly snort and Dagur decided to take this as positive reinforcement and a sign that he should keep talking as he pulled off his cloak and started pulling it apart. Even with the dragon as company he’d rather not let the quiet sneak up on him. If they were going to suffocate, they were going to suffocate, so at least he could die without screaming at shadows.

“Did I ever tell you how I got my scar? The one on my face, not… all the other ones, even though they’re pretty great too.” 

The dragon grunted. There was a small pool of blood underneath it where the wound had already dripped to the ground, and Dagur wasn’t sure how much blood a dragon was supposed to lose before it turned into a serious problem. He hoped it took a lot.

“So, back when I was locked up with the Outcasts- I told you and Heather about that, right? Lost my glorious battle with Hiccup, left with nothing to do but plan my revenge for three years?”

He started wrapping the deepest parts of the scrape with the strips of his cloak, not certain how much good it would ultimately do but figuring it was better than nothing. He was warm enough with the heat Windshear was giving off, anyway. Windshear herself was being surprisingly compliant, wincing away and letting out a few growls but not actually moving to stop him even as the ‘bandages’ likely renewed the sting in her side.

“They must have had a surplus of enemies who needed to be locked up or something, because at some point the guards decided to bless me with a cellmate! Me? Can you believe it? I dunno, maybe they wanted the guy dead, buuuuut anyway this poor idiot is maybe twice my size? Arms like freaking trees, and has no idea who I am, so he thinks he’s getting my share of that day’s food! Guard drops our two hunks of bread, walks off, guy pulls out the freakin’ fork he’s apparently managed to sneak past the guards, and-” Dagur stopped to laugh, patting Windshear on an uninjured chunk of her hide at the memory. 

“This guy rushes me with no weapon but that, just a fork, and he catches me by surprise and I’m empty handed so he manages to get a few lucky gouges in on my face before I manage to snap both of those tree-trunk arms like twigs and go to town on him with his own ‘weapon’ aaaaand- that’s it! That’s how I got the scar,” Dagur turned to look the dragon in the face and pointed at his right eye, managing to blurt out the word “Fork!” before he was overcome with the giggles again.

It was one of the few moments of his imprisonment he remembered fondly, in between bouts of being locked in the solitary cage away from the other prisoners and listening to the guy in the cell next to him whine endlessly. Three years locked up without a real, proper fight hadn’t done his already deranged personality any favors, Dagur realised.

Windshear didn’t really seem to get the joke, but that was fine. Dagur was really getting the appeal of all the talking to dragons the riders did more and more as he realised that he was pretty sure the beast actually was getting some of what he was talking about. It was certainly nice having company that didn’t badger him with stupid questions, for a change. Normally he only kinda got that out of Heather.

Dagur finished up wrapping the dragon’s wounds and then turned to take a look at its leg. It looked like when the old wolves back on Berserker would dislocate a hip, actually. It wasn’t immediately dangerous, probably, and… Dagur looked between the dragon’s face and leg and imagined trying to hold her still while putting her through the pain of putting a joint back in its socket without any sort of muscle relaxant.

“... yeah that’s not getting fixed anytime soon,” Dagur looked around, but any obvious weakness in the walls around him only looked like they were begging to be disrupted so they could drop more rubble right on him. “Looks like we’re in this for the long hall.”

Windshear nodded and then dropped its head to the cavern floor, shifting a wing to form a-

“A tent? For me! Oh, you shouldn’t have!” Dagur pressed a hand to his heart, exaggeratedly touched, before diving under the cover of the wing and curling up close to the dragon’s neck. He was heedless of any annoyed sighing it may or may not be doing.

“You know what this would be a perfect time for? Another story!” Oh yes, the dragon sounded even more totally enthusiastic about his storytelling abilities than last time. “ Ahheehehee, no really, you’ll like this one, it’s about Heather. About when she was real little.”

That one was definitely a genuinely interested noise. “I’m older- I was seven, when Dad gave her away. She was three. I don’t think she even knows what he gave her away for, and… well. It won’t make her any less mad I killed him, I think. I slaughtered her whole village and she still thought it was wrong to kill me when she found out I was family.”

Dagur waved a hand as if to shoo away the details and tried not to think about how hard the Razorwhip was staring at him now.

“... So we’re real little, right? And Dad- ‘Oswald the Agreeable’ - he’s gone and pissed off the Chief of another village, the Gut Splitters. I was at the meeting that started it all but I went to boring meetings like that all the time, I don’t even remember what was said. I remember a weird amount of yelling, but that’s it, I think I was carving something in the table or something,” he stopped to think for a moment, and the dragon nudged him along. “Hey, I’m getting to the point- anyway, whatever happened, the Chief threatens war over it. You never met my Dad, but he didn’t get the name Oswald the Agreeable for nothing, he haaaated war. The guy inherited an entire armada of bloodthirsty Berserkers and he never used them once. So he’s freaking out, I remember him- pacing, like I do all the time now, it’s like the one thing I got from him besides the hair.”

He stopped because Windshear decided to lean forward to press her nose against the wild mess he had growing on top of his head.

“Yeah, that stuff. The thing is, if my Dad had gone to war? We would have won, easy. Even with how weak he’d let the armada get, we were still Bersekers. The other Chief only bothered with a challenge because he knew my Dad was too weak to actually make any use of his army. So after Dad’s been stewing for a couple of days, a messenger shows up. He says the ‘Splitters are willing to forgo war in exchange for a hostage, insurance showing that the Berserkers will never even think of going after their village. In exchange for peace, they asked for Oswald’s only daughter. Heather.”

There is a long, low growl. It took him a second to realise it was coming from both of them, and then he laughed.

“I ever tell you you’re a dragon after my own heart, Windy? That’s about how I felt, but Dad- well. He cries a lot, obviously, makes a big show of how sorry he is and how he loves her and all of that… useless garbage, ‘cause he gave her away anyway. Which screwed us right over, because even after I grew up and killed him I couldn’t bring a single Berserker ship into their waters without them killing my sister.”

Windshear blinked, and tilted her head to the side, and Dagur got a good enough idea of its confusion to be annoyed.

“Well there wouldn’t be any point in revenge if she ended up dead, would there? It only occurred to me while I was in prison that if I wasn’t Berserker chief anymore, there wouldn’t be any reason for them to think to kill her if I brought in an army of mercenaries without any sort of flag,” Dagur scratched at the scraggly beard he’d grown in prison and lacked the steady hands to shave off himself. Not like he was letting anyone else near his neck with a razor. “... I thought they were keeping her like a hostage. If I’d known she’d had parents there… well. I don’t know if I would have handled it differently, I’m kind of a one-note sort of guy when it comes to using lethal force.”

He smiled, and Windshear lets out a low rumble that he thought might actually be a laugh, and no wonder Heather liked this monster so much.

“... maybe I would have killed the Chief and the warriors and spared a few stragglers if I hadn’t gotten to their empty prison and thought they’d killed her anyway years ago. Maybe. If she’d asked me.”

Dagur shifts under the dragon’s gaze, and then sighs. “Y’know, she denies it, but she’s still so obviously a Berserker, through and through. A bloodthirsty warlord goes on a rampage over her entire village, leaves her the only survivor- and thank Thor for that, she must have been out of the village or something- and she decides what? That she and her dragon are going to go on a roaring rampage of revenge to kill him alone! Who does that, besides someone who inherited the old Berserker rages? She almost did it, too! I don’t know if she could have turned out any better, with Oswald as her Dad. Maybe that whole ‘hostage’ thing turned out to be for the best, huh?”

Windshear looked at him skeptically, and he shrugged. “Well, whatever. Maybe not. Only reason I’m telling you any of this is ‘cause you can’t tell her and I figured it’d keep us both awake for awhile.”

The dragon snorted and shuffled the weird wing tent it had over them both before seemingly relaxing against the floor.

Dagur nudged its face with his foot. “No, seriously, you need to stay up. Or you might die or something. Of. Suffocation.”

Windshear let out a noise that he thought might be the audible personification of incredulity, because although even he didn’t know how long he’d been taking up air through talking by now it had definitely been awhile.

“Well, whatever. You need to stay awake or else. Here, let me tell you another one-”

-

Dagur told Windshear more stories than he’d be able to recall later, alone in that cavern. Eventually her fire went out, to conserve energy, and they were in the dark with only the sound of her shifting and the warmth of her against is back to reassure Dagur she was there. He managed to hold himself together, at least.

She heard it first, her entire body going stiff against him and her light flickering back on.

“- and so I told him- huh? What is it?” Dagur prodded her neck. “You hear something?”

Dagur managed to make himself shut up for a few moments before he heard it too. A steady chipping noise in the roof above them.

“...Say, Windy, you think you could make it to the other side of this hole? Maybe where they aren’t about to come down on top of us?”

It took some doing, and Dagur had to hold her foot up so it didn’t drag limply on the ground, but they managed to get to the other side of the hole before the ice picks started to break through. It wasn’t long after that before Heather, a rope tied around her waist, came bursting through the roof of the cavern. She lowered herself to the floor of the cavern, the light from above acting like a spotlight around her, and looked at them with a shocked expression.

“... you’re both okay?”

“‘Okay’ is a stretch, Windy got herself busted up trying to- uh, Windy, Windshear, maybe rethink that-”

Windshear had stood up and tried to bound forward as soon as Heather had her feet on the ground, but didn’t make two steps before her bad leg threw her off and she hit the floor.

“Windshear!” Heather rushed forward to help, looking her up and down.

“Like I was saying, she got hurt- helping me, for whatever reason. Her side was bleeding a ton and I think her back leg’s popped out of her hip.”

“She… you...” Heather took in Windshear’s bandaged side and then looked at him, like he was a Game of Maces and Talons that switched the rules up on her halfway through playing it. “... we need to help her out of here, then.”

“Ehh, we’ll jury-rig one of the sails and some rope, it’ll be fine,” Dagur waved the problem off and walked past her to look up at the hole, where several of the men they’d sailed here with were hanging by their own ropes, having obviously helped Heather with the dig. “You hear that, rocks-for-brains? Get one of the sails down!”

Dagur smirked as he watched the other vikings scurry up the wall like spooked Fireworms, then turned to look at Heather, who was still staring at him like a beached fish.

“What? I’m impatient, it took you long enough to get here,” Dagur walked toward her and sniffed. “You stop to eat on the way? I smell mutton.”

“I don’t see how, because I haven’t had any,” Heather frowned at him. “No, it just took me a while to convince the Dragon Hunters to follow my orders until we found you.”

“Oh, well, we’ll have to fix that. They should follow your orders all the time, we’re… co-conquerors or something. Give me a list of people who gave you lip and I’ll deal with ‘em.”

“I can handle them myself,” Heather shook her head, then looked down at Windshear, who she was still holding and petting wherever it wouldn’t hurt. “... you tried to help her.”

Dagur shrugged. “You’d have killed me if I didn’t. Besides, Windy and I had a nice sibling bonding experience trapped alone and starving to death.”

“Sibling bonding experience?”

“Yeah, she’s also my sister, I’ve decided. No takesie-backsies,” Dagur grinned down at the Razorwhip, who rolled her eyes at him. “See? Windy agrees.”

“Well, she hasn’t killed you for the new nickname, so that’s a good sign,” Heather looked between the two of them, eyebrows furrowed. “You always used to call her ‘it’, before.”

“I did? That doesn’t sound like me,” Now Heather and Windshear were both staring at him. “Maybe it does? Well, that was rude of me, no wonder she tried to bite me all the time.”

“I- yeah,” Heather’s gaze fell to the floor, frowning thoughtfully, before they heard a ‘whump’ from behind Dagur. They looked to find that there was already a sail lying limply on the floor, attached to ropes that disappeared into the opening in the ceiling.

“Huh. They worked faster than usual.”

“I- kind of put the fear of Odin into them to get them to obey me.”

“You have them cowed? Excellent! That will help with re-educating them regarding your status. Well, come on Windy, time to get out of this stupid icehole.” Dagur started toward the sail, waving Windshear along, but stopped when Heather’s hand fell on to his arm. “Yes, Sister?”

“I-” Heather seemed to muster something in herself, and then looked him in the eye. “Thank you, Dagur.”

“Pfft,” Dagur snorted and waved off her hand, trying not to think of how she’d never initiated contact with him before now. “What are siblings for, right? Especially ones as amazing as me. Come on, I’m starving.”

All things considered, Dagur thought as they were lifted out of the cave, it had been a weirdly productive trip.

-

Weeks Later

-

Dagur stared at Windshear’s cage, the long dragon bent oddly in order to fit, and wondered how he hadn’t realised that his sisters were traitors in the first place.

Between them and Hiccup, maybe he was just- gullible, when he wanted someone to like him.

… maybe he just kept putting himself in positions where he and people he wanted to like him couldn’t be on the same side.

Well. It didn’t matter. Two instances of betrayal didn’t make a pattern, and he was turning the tables before it turned into one.

“Hey, Windy,” the dragon glared at him like she hadn’t since the Ice Crack incident. He held up a key. “I’ve got a plan. Do you trust me?”

Windshear’s eyes widened, darting up and down like she was sizing him up. It was a long moment, before she nodded.

“Good, at least one of you has the sense Odin gave a boulder. So!” Dagur slid the key into the lock and turned it with a ‘ker-chunk’. “I’m gonna need you to do what I tell you, for once, and then we’re gonna get you and Heather out of here, how’s that sound?”

Windshear slid out of her cage and then stood there, waiting for his plan.

“Good girl! So, here’s what we’re gonna do-”

**Author's Note:**

> Started writing this right after I finished marathoning 'Race to the Edge' two days ago, in between reading other people's fic. My grip on Dagur's character is still kinda shakey, and around the point he starts rambling on for entire paragraphs, asking answerless questions and answerring questions no one ever asked I start wanting to. Die. But hopefully it was at least mostly comprehensible.


End file.
